Daido Moriyama
[Photographer, b. 1938, Ikeda-cho, Osaka, Japan, lives in Tokyo.]
I do not try to find myself in what I “shoot,” but perhaps I want to see the position of the world I am in.
For me, photography is not a means by which to create beautiful art, but a unique way of encountering genuine reality at the point where the enormous fragments of the world — which I can never completely embrace by taking photos — coincide with my own inextricable predicament.
…I wish to take photographs freely, without technical restrictions. For example, I take most of my snapshots from a moving car, or without looking through the viewfinder when I am on foot. You might say I take photographs not only with my eyes, but with my entire body.
For me, photography is not the endeavor to create a two-dimensional work of art, but by taking photo after photo, I come closer to truth and reality at the very intersection of the fragmentary nature of the world and my own personal sense of time.
I brush aside words and ideas, and focus on photography as a means of expressing a message that is both psychological and phenomenological. Without that framework, my approach is very simple—there is no artistry. I just shoot freely. For example, most of my snapshots I take from a moving car, or while running, without the finder, and in those instances one might say that I’m taking the pictures more with my body than with my eyes.
There isn’t much difference between photographing in color or black-and-white.
Although photography is called an art, the photograph is not a
tableau, born of nothing; it is not something unique, like a painting or a sculpture or the productions of the other arts. It is rather like an optical machine developed to such a point that nowadays even a cat can take photos.
Language is a direct medium and communicates meaning and intention straight. A photograph, on the other hand, is subject to the viewer’s memory, aesthetics, and feelings—all of which affect how the photograph is seen.
